'The Asian Delegation Chooses […] the Wu-Tang Clan!'—

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‘The Asian Delegation Chooses […] the Wu-Tang Clan!’— 

Sustaining hip-hop culture through strategic appropriation of 

Asian/American culture 

Graham Chia-Hui Preston 

University of Melbourne 

On the second season premiere of the immensely popular and critically important 

Chappelle’s Show sketch comedy television program, Dave Chappelle stages his version of 

what he calls the ‘Racial Draft 2004.’ Modeled upon the amateur drafts of sports like 

football, basketball, baseball and hockey, the Racial Draft consists of racial groups (Whites, 

Blacks, Latinos, Jews, Asians) selecting and naming an interracial individual as a member of 

their ‘race.’ As Chappelle notes in the ‘wraparound’ segment that introduces the sketch, ‘we 

all mixed up. I mean genetically *…+ We need to just settle this once and for all. We need to 

have a draft. That’s right I said it’ (Chappelle’s Show 2004). Chappelle offers examples like 

Halle Berry, Derek Jeter and Tiger Woods as famous figures whose ‘mixed’ racial and genetic 

makeup incites arguments and confusion between the ‘races’, including within Chapplle’s 

own family. He tells us that he and his Chinese wife argue over which ‘side’ of Tiger Woods 

is ‘hitting the ball so well’ (Chappelle’s Show 2004). The Racial Draft though, as Chappelle’s 

African American commentator character comments, ‘will state the racial standing of these 

Americans, once and for all’ (Chappelle’s Show 2004). 

During the course of this eight minute sketch, there are seven selections but, for the 

purposes of this paper, I would like to only discuss the last choice. The Asian or Chinese 

delegation (the two terms are used interchangeably) holds the final selection and a white 

commentator notes that they have ‘been waiting with Zen-like patience’ (Chappelle’s Show 

2004). In the climax of the sketch, the head Asian delegate, dressed in clothes that are 

Online Proceedings of ‘Sustaining Culture’ (2008) 

Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia (CSAA) 

UniSA, Adelaide December 6-8, 2007 

http://unisa.edu.au/com/csaa/onlineproceedings.htm

vaguely reminiscent or stereotypical of Communist Chinese fashions of the 1960s, 

cautiously approaches the microphone and exclaims, ‘the Asian delegation chooses the RZA, 

the GZA, U-God, Inspectah Deck, the Ghostface Killah: the Wu-Tang Clan!’ (Chappelle’s Show 

2004). The commentators declare that the Asian delegation has made the shock pick of the 

night by choosing the exclusively African-American hip-hop group. The Wu-Tang Clan, 

however, are well known for their appropriation and sampling of Asian (American) cinema 

and culture in their work and identity. The RZA and the GZA—the two de facto leaders of 

the hip-hop group—come up on stage to joyously accept the selection. The RZA exclaims, 

‘this is big for us, yo, because we’ve always been a fan of the kung fu and the Chinese 

culture and shit’. The GZA follows by reminding us to ‘diversify our bonds’ (an allusion to a 

first season Chappelle’s Show sketch) before concluding, ‘Konichiwa, bitches!’ (Chappelle’s 

Show 2004). 

The moment is undeniably comic, but it also exposes a number of important issues about 

the construction and delineation of ‘race’ and Asian/American identity in popular American 

culture. While the sketch’s humour derives ostensibly from the absurdity of naming an 

African-American hip-hop group as Asian through the process of a ‘Racial Draft,’ the 

moment also gestures towards the deeper cultural and historical resonances of the group’s 

use of and engagement with, to use the RZA’s words, ‘the kung fu and the Chinese culture 

and shit’. In its punch line, Chappelle’s sketch foregrounds the group’s reliance upon Asian- 

American culture for its own innovations, musical palette and, most of all, identity, since the 

group’s name and many of the individual emcees’ names are all taken from kung fu cinema 

of the 1970s. This privileging of the hybrid nature of the Clan over their lyrical (and, to a 

lesser extent, musical) subject matter, which locates the group mainly in the urban life of 

Staten Island, New York, is important in that it elides any number of issues that the group 

deals with in favour of the group’s artistic use of Asian cinema and culture. What is 

noteworthy here is that the Wu-Tang Clan inverts the usual model of American cultural flow 

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and appropriation (the African-American group here takes from Asian America) as a means 

of what one could call cultural sustainability. 

Drawing upon and adapting Paul Gilroy’s notion of antiphony, this paper thinks through hip- 

hop’s modes of sustaining itself and its artistic practices through an examination of the Wu- 

Tang Clan’s engagement with and appropriation of aspects of Asian and Asian-American 

culture, including cinema, music and art. Employing various musical and computer 

technologies, the Wu-Tang Clan uses Asian (American) culture as a means to assert 

antiphonally a sort of cultural hybridity, that stakes a unique territory in modern African- 

American popular culture, which in its turn, sustains the culture. In other words, the Wu- 

Tang Clan sustains their work through strategic and antiphonal appropriation of Asian- 

American culture. 

Before I go further, I think a brief account of the group is necessary here. Formed in the 

early 1990s in the Staten Island borough of New York (known in the group’s lexicon as 

Shaolin), the Wu-Tang Clan initially consisted of nine emcees including Ol’ Dirty Bastard 

(now deceased), Method Man, Ghostface Killah, the GZA, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, U-God, 

Masta Killa and the RZA who also leads the group and produces nearly all the group’s 

material. The group’s sheer size and organisation was unique, and instead of boasting one 

star, according to Nelson George (1998, p. 113), ‘with *the Wu-Tang Clan] the posse is the 

star’. In 1993, they released their debut record Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, which sold 

over a million copies and set a new standard for hip-hop lyricism, production and musical 

innovation. Particularly important are the RZA’s dark, claustrophobic beats, which Kodwo 

Eshun (1998, pp. 47-48) describes as ‘phantasmic HipHop productions [that] induce visions 

in the ear. Every breath becomes a wince of pain like a knife being swallowed’. Eshun 

gestures here towards the almost cinematic nature of the RZA’s music, which juxtaposes 

samples from soul artists like Isaac Hayes with the RZA’s own jazz inspired (and 

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sometimes out of tune) keyboard lines and the group’s own voices (RZA 2005, pp. 189-192). 

The group has subsequently released three albums, with one—8 Diagrams—on shelves 11 

December 2007, a number of solo albums of varying critical and commercial success, film 

appearances, video games, a clothing label, and a book. The RZA has also scored kung fu 

cinema inspired films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume One (2003) and Jim 

Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai (1999). 

One of the elements that set the group’s music apart from its contemporaries was the RZA’s 

reliance on vocal samples from kung fu films—a trend in the group’s music from its earliest 

recordings to its latest album, 8 Diagrams, which samples liberally, both in musical and 

conceptual terms, from the film The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (1983). The RZA usually 

used clips from films that he had become ‘really hooked’ on during his youth in the late 

1970s (RZA 2005, p. 58). For example, ‘Da Mystery of Chessboxing’ from 1993’s Enter the 

Wu-Tang, appropriates its title from The Mystery of Chessboxing (1979), whilst employing 

vocal samples at the song’s beginning from Shaolin and Wu-Tang (1981) and Five Deadly 

Venoms (1978), which, respectively compare sword fighting to chess and declare the 

invincibility of ‘toad style’. The RZA would later comment that the samples were ‘perfect for 

what I was trying to say about my crew. That’s how I felt Wu was – invincible’ (Leckart 

2007). The RZA uses these samples as a means of asserting facets of the group’s approach 

and their collective strength. 

Kung fu films have been enormously influential on Hollywood action films and can be 

observed in films such as, most famously, The Matrix. Accordingly, there has been much 

discussion in cinema studies circles of this transnational appeal. In her introduction to Hong 

Kong Connections, Meaghan Morris notes (2005, p. 2) that ‘Hong Kong films are watched, 

copied, collected, discussed, pirated, re-made, parodied and appropriated in many different 

viewing situations all over the world’ (emphasis added). While not to discount the visual 

aspect of the group’s work (i.e. music videos, film appearances, live performances), I would 

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add that the Wu-Tang Clan are a fundamental example of cinema’s impact upon other 

artistic forms such as, in this case, hip-hop music. In other words, kung fu cinema has had an 

impact upon much more than just other visual art forms, and has become a sort of collective 

repository of imagery. 

I should pause here to clarify my use of the term ‘Asian-American’ in relation to kung fu 

cinema. While the films themselves were mostly produced in Hong Kong (though some had 

funding from Hollywood), the films that the Wu-Tang Clan watched were dubbed into 

American-accented English (as evidenced by the vocal samples throughout the group’s 

music). Stephen Teo notes that 

[t]he tactic of dubbing local kung fu films into English and other languages 

also meant that the narratives were slightly modified and the often quite 

bad dubbing practices led to unintentional humour in scenes. (2005, p. 

196) 

The films’ modifications then turned them into, to adapt David Palumbo-Liu’s (1999) 

suggestive replacement of a space or hyphen with a forward-slash, a sort of Asian/American 

form that resides in an indeterminate and interstitial space between Asia and America. The 

films would, I think, be seen and understood by the Wu-Tang Clan in terms of an imagining 

of Asia through an explicitly American frame of reference, which would sight/cite 

populations of Asian Americans (Asian diaspora), perhaps first and foremost. 

In this sense, kung fu cinema and the Wu-Tang Clan are neat examples of the result of the 

global flows of Arjun Appadurai (1996), and specifically of his notion that 

the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of 

work *…+ and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) 

and globally defined fields of possibility. (1996, p. 31) 

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One could account for the group’s relationship with Asian cinema as a result of the 

‘organized field of social practices’ that emerges out of the global reception, appreciation 

and appropriation of kung fu cinema. The imagination here, linked with Benedict Anderson’s 

concept of the imaging of community (1983), would account for the Clan’s selection by the 

Asian Delegation in the Chappelle’s Show sketch. But the situation is made more complex 

when one considers and recalls the complicated history and diffuse ‘racial’ politics of 

African-American music, and specifically of hip-hop culture. Additionally, an explanation 

based solely on an Appaduraian model of global flows and the social practices of 

imagination curiously elides specific aesthetic tropes and strategies involved in the 

production and dissemination of African-American music. 

I think that Paul Gilroy’s articulation of the role of antiphony and call-and-response song in 

the music of ‘the Black Atlantic’ (1993a) is especially useful and appropriate. Originally used 

to describe a practice of choral ensembles, antiphony here refers to a reliance on a form of 

African call-and-response song, of which Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), for example, has found 

formal residues in gospel (1963, p. 46) and blues music (1963, p. 62). Furthermore, and 

building upon Jones’s trajectory, it can be found as a guiding form in most of the genres of 

music that have followed on blues practices, such as jazz, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll 

and, ultimately, hip-hop. For Gilroy, ‘*a+ntiphony (call and response) is the principal formal 

feature’ (1993a, p. 78) of Black Atlantic music practices and aesthetic traditions such as 

‘mimesis, gesture, kinesis, and costume’ (1993a, p. 78). It is also notable for ‘supplying, 

along with improvisation, montage and dramaturgy, the hermeneutic keys to the full 

medley of black artistic practices’ (1993a, p. 78). Additionally, and this is the key resonance 

of antiphony, 

[l]ines between self and other are blurred and special forms of pleasure are 

created as a result of the meetings and conversations that are established 

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etween one fractured, incomplete, and unfinished racial self and others. 

Antiphony is the structure that hosts these essential encounters’ (1993a, p. 

79). 

It is in the call-and-response that differing voices are overtly put into direct discussion, and it 

is also then the site of possible slippages and productive (if sometimes traumatic) exchange 

on or of racial, ethnic and aesthetic identity, especially when one notes that global flows of 

culture are making it ‘harder to locate’ (1993a, p. 110) the original call. Gilroy notes that ‘the 

globalisation of vernacular forms means that our understanding of antiphony will have to 

change’ (1993a, p. 110). Thus, while Gilroy quotes Ralph Ellison’s notion that ‘jazz is an art of 

individual assertion within and against the group’ (quoted in 1993a, p. 79, emphasis added), 

one should note that, with the rise of regimes of globalisation, the antiphonal assertion can 

often be located outside the group and brought into the conversation through processes 

such as sampling, interpellation or appropriation. 

As a technique, antiphony opens up other strategies and forms such as appropriation. 

Gilroy makes this link explicit when he quotes an interview he conducted with Toni Morrison 

in Small Acts. Morrison comments, 

[m]y parallel is always the music because all of the strategies of the arts are 

there. All of the intricacy, all of the discipline *…+ It never gives you the 

whole number. It slaps and embraces, it slaps and embraces *…+ I don’t 

imitate it, but I am informed by it. Sometimes I hear blues, sometimes 

spirituals or jazz and I’ve appropriated it. I’ve tried to reconstruct the 

texture of it in my writing. (1993b, pp. 181-182) 

The key phrase here that links antiphony with appropriation is ‘slaps and embraces’, which 

speaks to the discursive and sometimes fraught nature of borrowing across media, 

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especially within this framework of mediation between self, others and racial identity. 

Morrison gestures here towards the teasing, almost always incomplete and heavily allusive 

nature of antiphonal appropriation. One ‘call’ may be responded to, in turn, by an 

unexpectedly fierce response. A further complication comes in hip-hop’s engagement with 

and modulation of previously existing technologies, as well as the broad role of technology 

in the production of its art (i.e. digital sampling). Gilroy notes that ‘the aesthetic rules which 

govern [hip-hop] are premised on a dialectic of rescuing appropriation and recombination 

which creates special pleasures’ (1993a, p. 103). Hip-hop foregrounds the central strategies 

of antiphony and appropriation through its reliance on technology for much (but not all) of 

its appropriated material. 

I would like to turn now to a brief example of the Wu-Tang Clan’s antiphonal appropriation 

of Asian/American cultural material. The opening track from the 2000 Album The W, ‘Intro 

(Shaolin Finger Jab)/Chamber Music’, opens with a series of vocal samples from Five Deadly 

Venoms (1978). The RZA samples the voice of the dying master who warns his young 

student, ‘I must tell you that the Clan is a danger to the public … but still for many men just 

to hear of the name fills them with hate and loathing’ (Five Deadly Venoms 1978). In the 

film, these lines set up the action of the plot (the student must find the various ‘venoms’ of 

the Clan), but transposed into this introductory track, they speak to the Wu-Tang Clan 

themselves and their supposed danger and notoriety. In other words, the kung fu cinema 

sample is a call, which demands a response from the emcees of the Wu-Tang Clan. Four 

members of the Clan respond, and their verses seek mostly to confirm the sentiment of the 

vocal sample. Raekwon cautions against ‘“*f+rontin” like you won’t get deaded and bumped 

off’ (Wu-Tang Clan 2000) while the GZA soberly comments that in ‘most heated battles, I've 

blasted MC's/Some said that the bullets flew by like angry bees’ (Wu-Tang Clan 2000). This 

song is a representative example of how the Wu-Tang Clan usually treats their vocal samples 

from kung fu cinema as something to respond to (the trend holds from 1993’s ‘Bring da 

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Ruckus’ to 2007’s ‘Campfire’). The end result of this use of antiphonal appropriation is the 

central embedding of an element of Asian America within the key call-and-response song 

form. Furthermore, as seen in the example from ‘Shaolin Finger Jab’, the group uses these 

samples not as touchstones for comedy or parody but, instead, as a source of identity. 

One of the most important resonances of this phenomenon is how the Wu-Tang Clan inverts 

the usual models of cultural appropriation and flows of sub-cultural capital. These models 

usually posit Black America as a cultural and musical engine that is raided by other ‘racial’ 

and ethnic groups (usually white, as in the examples of blackface minstrelsy, jazz, rock ‘n’ 

roll, rhythm and blues, and dance music). Studies of hip-hop such as Tricia Rose’s influential 

Black Noise (1994) have tended to reify this paradigm into a grand narrative of the sub- 

culture’s history. 

This inversion is particularly noteworthy when one considers the place of Asian America in 

American racial and cultural life. Originally writing in 1972, cultural nationalist and author 

Frank Chin (1998, p. 74) suggests that ‘the success of the Chinese American minority is 

based on their being mightily, sincerely, definitely not black’. Chin goes further when he 

excitedly notes, ‘*w+e’re hated by the blacks because the whites love us for being everything 

the blacks are not’ (1998, p. 74). One of the sites where Asian America and African America 

have been defined against each other has been gender and sexuality. Lisa Lowe (1996, p. 11) 

argues that the historical construction of a ‘technology’ of simultaneous racialisation and 

gendering was central to Asian-American immigration and citizenship. Critics such as 

Richard Fung (2000, p. 340) and David L Eng (2001, pp. 1-34) have traced the ultimate 

results of this ‘technology,’ which has tended towards a ‘feminization’ of Asian-American 

males. Accordingly, Frank Chin (1998, pp. 63-109) rallies against this feminisation, which he 

sees manifested directly in the Charlie Chan films, in much of his writing. The Wu-Tang 

Clan’s turn towards Asia (America) marks a unique move in that it harvests and highlights a 

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strong type of Asian identity (kung fu) over other modes that trivialise Asian-Americans 

(Charlie Chan). 

To conclude, I would like to return to the Chappelle’s Show sketch, which positions the 

group’s antiphonal appropriation of Asian-American culture in a decidedly central position 

in the Wu-Tang Clan’s music and identity. Indeed, strategic borrowings of new forms into 

hip-hop’s antiphonal conversations could be thought of as a way to think through the sub- 

culture’s sustainability throughout its history. The sketch though ultimately asks us to 

discount complex assemblages of identity in favour of an all-or-nothing proposition. That is, 

the avatar that flashes when the RZA and the GZA accept their selection tells us that the 

Wu-Tang Clan is ‘Now 100% Asian’ (Chappelle’s Show 2004). This would seem to run counter 

to the very model of a call and response song, which is an indeterminate, negotiated and 

complex conversation, and which, to use Toni Morrison’s memorable phrase, can ‘slap and 

embrace’. The Racial Draft, of course, is a fantasy and an analogy, which emphasises its 

issues through exaggeration. Ultimately, the sketch interrogates the stakes of the 

‘hermeneutic key’ of antiphony in an era of transnational flows of culture. 

References 

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essays, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, pp. 63-109. 

Eng, DL 2001, Racial castration: managing masculinity in Asian America, Duke University 

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Eshun, K 1998, More brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction, Quartet Books, 

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